


minor mendings

by firstaudrina



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, cameos by julia and penny and alice, gen but make it shippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-23 00:34:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18538681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: “I felt like I was in a black hole the whole time you were gone.”an alternate take on 4x13, "no better to be safe than sorry." except all safe, no sorry.





	minor mendings

**Author's Note:**

> just trying to make myself feel better, as one does. 
> 
> written for this [prompt](https://girljustdied.dreamwidth.org/263262.html?thread=7122526#cmt7122526).

Penny goes inside Julia’s head and she comes out a goddess. The fissure in her back knits itself together again. She doesn’t look any different to Quentin, except for the way she holds herself, casually straight-spined and square-shouldered. Her expression is blasé and unreadable. Relief and unease war on Penny’s face.

“Get the other one,” Julia says. “I can take them to the seam.”

 

 

 

The creature is worn down and worn out, Eliot’s body hanging on its consciousness like a rumpled suit. “Everything that I do…” it says, slow and careful, its hands full of crushed leaves. “Always for nothing. Circles and circles. In the castle, at least…” It becomes reflective, sad. “I could play.”

But when Quentin takes a step forward, the malaise melts off the monster and it’s on its feet, Penny thrown back in the dirt from the force of its sudden anger. It takes Quentin by the neck and slams him against a tree, bark scraping his skin through his clothes, Eliot’s hand crushing his windpipe.

“No body…” the monster says. “Not even that. Maybe I’ll have yours. After all you’ve done.” It brings its spare hand to its own throat, fingertip as dangerous as a blade. “But first to dispose of this one.” 

Quentin starts to shout, but Margo has already hooked the axe into its side.

 

 

 

Quentin’s hands slip against Margo’s, both of them frantic to stop the blood surging out of Eliot at an alarming rate. They form a strange patchwork of fingers, interlocked like they’re holding hands, doing complex cooperative magic. But the magic’s dried up. 

There is gore on Quentin’s knuckles. “Jesus Christ, Margo, did you have to aim for _all_ his organs?”

“Oh, fuck you, Coldwater, come talk to me about _aim_ the next time somebody goes all goddamn Linda Blair.” Her mouth is tight, a vein taut in her forehead. Her eyes on Eliot’s face, so every time his lashes so much as flutter, she can scream, “Eliot!” Again, “Eliot!”

Eliot is stubbornly unresponsive. Until lazily, wavering, “I’m bleeding to death, Bambi, I’m not hard of hearing.”

Quentin could pass out, honestly, from hearing his voice — from hearing _his_ voice.

“Like hell you are,” Margo says, angry, and a cold tear streaks down her cheek. It leaves a salted path in her blush. 

“Okay.” Eliot sounds soft and amused, so familiar that Quentin could laugh, and maybe scream when he touches the ragged edges of fabric and skin that the axe left behind. “If you say so, I’ll stop.”

Quentin’s fingers start to shift to cast a repairing spell against Eliot, even though there isn’t a drop of magic to drink. “El —” he starts, and there is Eliot’s warm hand on the side of his face. He touches Quentin’s mouth, the press of his thumb against the center of his bottom lip.

“Good to see me,” Eliot says, and passes out.

 

 

 

In the infirmary they wait, pacing. Margo will not allow Josh to clean her hands. She hasn’t put her fairy eye back in, and the starkness of the eyepatch seems to highlight the hollow terror in her human eye. Quentin licks his lips nervously and tastes iron, the dry imprint of blood left behind by Eliot’s thumb. He had forgotten it was there. Alice takes him by the wrist and he’s grateful for her, there, stilling his tremors. Even if it doesn’t feel like it did before. Even if Quentin knows that, has known it the whole time. 

Julia is in the mirror world with Zelda and Penny. Quentin knows that she will return whole and unharmed and that this all-consuming issue will be over, just like that. He’s learned to always be sure of Julia.

 

 

 

“Bambi, your manicure,” Eliot despairs, weak and wrapped in bandages in his hospital bed. Margo laughs and kisses him, cheek wet with tears, not giving a fuck. Quentin had seized Eliot’s arm as soon as he sat down and he can’t make himself let go. 

Reading his mind, Margo says, “I feel like you’re gonna disappear every time I take my eye off you.”

“Yes, someone might impale me on an axe or something,” Eliot says mildly. 

She puts her fairy eye on the bedside table so it can stare at Eliot unceasingly while she washes her hands. It’s funny, in a way Quentin feels very distantly, how seriously she has taken the idea of making unbroken eye contact with someone she loves. 

“Eliot,” Quentin says, quiet and raw. 

“I knew you would do it.” He turns his arm over in Quentin’s grip and shifts so they’re palm to palm instead. “I just didn’t think you’d take so long.” 

He’s joking; there’s humor in eyes, underneath the glaze of pain meds. But there’s something else too, a solemn certainty that Quentin doesn’t remember seeing before. 

“I felt like I was in a black hole the whole time you were gone.” 

Eliot squeezes his fingers. “Me too. But quite literally in my case, so I win.”

He wants to laugh. “I thought —” Starts, stops.

Patiently, “What did you think?”

That he’d finally reached the end of his rope and there was none left. The same place he’d found himself before, except this time for good. Circles, like the monster said. 

“I’m happy you’re alive, El,” he says instead. Just weird enough to not quite fit in a greeting card, but so much less than all the things he’s feeling. 

Eliot seems to get it anyway. “Tell me everything I missed.”

Quentin would rather think of all the things he still has coming. “Well,” he starts, “you should probably know that Margo fell in love with a fish.”

Eliot’s startled, horrified laughter is like permission, a release, and Quentin’s heart starts pumping, someone hitting the top of a jukebox in an old sitcom to get it going. Music again.


End file.
